this is bbc news, the headlines... russian and ukrainian forces are fighting in the streets of bakhmut but russia does not control the city, its deputy mayor has said. 4,000 civilians are living in shelters without access to electricity or water. hundreds of school girls in iran have been targeted in apparent poison gas attacks. schools in at least 15 provinces were attacked on saturday. the incidents have been happening since november but have spread in scope and scale over the past week. the united nations and iran reach an agreement that would allow un officials to carry out further inspections of tehran�*s nuclear programme following talks between iranian officials and the head of the un nuclear watchdog. in a new interview, prince harry

describes writing his memoir as an act of service. he says he hopes sharing details of his life will help others. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for talking business. hello, everybody. a very warm welcome to talking business weekly with me, aaron heslehurst. let's go and take a look at what's on the show. the digital revolution is in full swing. expanding the internet of everything and moving life to the cloud is driving a boom in the tech industry, particularly in the world of data and where it's kept. from the drive to autonomous cars to using ai chat bots, to your emails and text or storing your photos and to watching your favourite show. all of this, almost everything we do on our devices is dependent on these kind of places. and the nuts and bolts powering our online lives comes with a carbon cost, as these data centres are energy hungry and often use vast amounts

of water to keep their systems cool. so can the industry keep growing sustainably? well, i'm going to be discussing all of that with these two. there they are, an it energy watcher from greenpeace and the vice president of a huge multinational who specialise in internet connections and data centres all around the world. also, can you help heat a city by streaming the latest cat video? i'm going to be catching up with the big boss of one of europe's top power companies capturing waste energy to warm your homes. wherever you'rejoining me from around the world, once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. you know, all of our lives are moving more and more online and more and more of that life

is now in the cloud. we store our photos, ourfamily memories, our shopping lists, and our endless, endless emails to this other place. but the cloud is not some bunch of mist floating in the sky. no, it's a vast digital infrastructure — huge networks of cables and processes, the cogs behind the machine powering our online world. and housing all of this are data centres, increasingly massive buildings containing vast banks of servers, holding and crunching our ever expanding online existence. and it's a business on the rise — a global market estimated to have been worth under $200 billion back in 2020 is predicted to reach over half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade, which would mean growing something in the region of over 10% a year, all driven by our expanding use of the web. in fact, well overfive billion people were estimated to have used the internet last year. that's around two thirds of the world's population.

and as you can see, the trend is only heading in one direction. but this cloud revolution comes with a carbon cost. these data centres, they require vast amounts of power to cool the heat created by churning those gazillions of ones and zeros, collectively, in 2021, they used around i% of the entire global electricity demand, which may sound relatively small — but let's put it in perspective. each one of these large facilities uses around the same amount of electricity needed to power over 80,000 homes. and all of this is adding up. it's been estimated that the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet, and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. but just how aware are we of all of this? well, i hit the streets of london to find out. i'm always on my phone. i'm always using emails, checking everything. when i wake up in the morning, the first thing i do

is check my phone, my e—mail, if i have a call or something. and then i stream. i go and just scroll down my instagram account because that's my usual thing to do when i wake up. do you know all of that, what you just said has an impact on the environment? i think it has. so are you good at deleting old emails, old text messages old e—mails, old text messages that you no longer need? is that to do with the environment? oh, i was not aware of that. is that because of the way that it's stored on servers? right. — i never thought about it. yeah. most of those things is myjob to send emails is myjob to send e—mails and use those technologies, and i never thought about the environment that way. would you use less technology to help me help the environment? to help the environment? i would. but unfortunately, nowadays, our whole life is centred on this one device that we call our phone. so when i broke my phone, i realised

i literally cannot do anything. well, to help us get to the bottom ofjust how this new world of hyper scale digital infrastructure is affecting our planet, i've been speaking to one specialist who spent the last few years looking into just that for the environmental campaign group greenpeace. a real pleasure having you on the show. ruiqi, can we start with this? paint me a brief picture for the audience of why this explosion of data and the centres that house and process it is a concern for the environment and of course, climate change. i used to have a cell phone. maybe 5gb is enough for me like five years ago, and now i have to upgrade it to i28gb. so maybe in the next five years, who knows? i might need like 500gb. so just imagine this same appetite for data storage also happening

in parallel in the business or manufacturing world. if we talk about smart cities, smart manufacturing, etc, and autonomous driving, and it will only create more demand for data, and this explosion is creating a huge climate impact. the link is really aimed at the rapidly growing energy consumption. but ruiqi, i want to ask you this, because it's a tricky balancing act, isn't it? because there's no turning back on this digital world that we all live in and that we rely on and to run that we absolutely need these massive data centres. i mean, you're an environmentalist, you work for greenpeace, but surely you use and rely on this digital world like all of us. i'm just wondering, what's the answer? 0h, definitely. the key is really about cleaning

up the energy source. for example, a lot of the companies are starting to switching to 100% renewable energy, companies like google, meta, microsoft, apple, etc. they have made a commitment to go 100% renewable energy across supply chain by 2030. and a lot of the chinese tech giants like alibaba, tencent and baidu are also playing catch—up. so they have made similar commitments. however, this is not not enough. however, this is not enough. as i mentioned, a lot of companies are cleaning up their own data centres, electricity and emissions, but they haven't do much in terms of cleaning up the supply of cleaning up their supply chain, for example. so the data centre may be run by clean energy, but the equipment, the service, the chips inside of computers etc could still be manufactured

with dirty energy. ruiqi, i want to ask you this. you know, when we see environmentalists campaigning against climate change, we see the same old messages, you know — stop flying, don't drive a petrol or a diesel car, cut your meat consumption, etc, but what i've never seen from a campaigner is a message about reducing our digital footprint, like send less e—mails or text messages, stream less tv shows or films. i personally haven't seen those sort of messages. i'm wondering, ruiqi, have campaigners missed a trick here? you brought up a really great question. definitely these tips helps reduce our individual carbon footprint on our cloud or our virtual presence. maybe we should start thinking about how much tech would really need.

do we really need to send that screenshot? keep that much videos or photos in our cloud space? i think those are really great questions and worth considering. however, as an individual and as a consumer, i do think that our biggest power really lies in our advocate power. so, talk to the companies — tell google and apple, for example, that we need to address their climate impact, including those in the supply chain. well, on that point, ruiqi ye from greenpeace, a real pleasure having you on the show. thanks for your time and i'll talk to you soon. thank you. butjust what is the tech industry doing to combat some of these issues? well, to find out, i've been straight to the source talking to the vice president of european operations at equinix. they're one of the biggest global data centre providers working with the likes of google, microsoft and amazon.

gary aitkenhead, a real pleasure having you on my show. and gary, i've already highlighted at the top of the show the growth rate of data centres around the world. but i just want to hear your perspective because this growth is phenomenal. but obviously i'm thinking it's also a must for the increasing digital lives that we're all living these days. i don't think most people and i didn't before ijoined this industry, realise how much they depend upon data centres for what they do every day. so absolutely everything that works in our digital life, you know, whether it's social media or streaming, as well as everything that we use in our working life actually, you know, in terms of enterprise systems and even all of the government health care systems, even traffic lights, things like that are all run by systems that sit within the cloud or sit within data centres like ours. so, a very interesting statistic from idc that predicts that every

digitally connected person, which is almost going to be everyone on the planet by 2025, is going to have 5,000 interactions every single day. and all of those interactions are going through data centres like ours. and gary, you're speaking to us from ireland, a small country that's positioned itself as a tech hub with a relatively large number of data centres. and according to the iea, the international energy agency, those data centre account for about 14% of ireland's total electricity usage. that seems like a big number. and i'm wondering if that appears just to reflect how energy hungry these centres are. there's no question that data centres around the world are large consumers of electricity. and if you imagine how many of us are using these digital services in our life every day, that requires substantial amounts of electricity in order to keep all that it running.

but actually what that has driven the industry to do and driven our company to do is actually to drive a whole kind of sustainability initiative where we're really focused on using renewable energy. and right now, actually, we use 95% of the energy that we use globally is already renewable and will be 100% by the end of the decade. and secondly, what it's driving us to do is actually to be more efficient in the use of our energy. and water, lots of these centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. but, gary, a lot of these centres are set up in arid places like arizona, nevada, in the united states. what sense does that make? because i'm just wondering if this is an industry guided by cost or space or incentives for locations away from where they're best suited, i mean, as a layman, i'd think why not alaska, a cold place with lots of water? yeah, it's an interesting question.

and a lot of people ask that. and, you know, the location of data centres is chosen through a number of things. first of all, it's actually proximity to the people that are using the it that's in our data centres. so often the data centres and the it needs to be located close to metros where people are because there's latency requirements for things like financial services and for streaming and video. and some of the applications can be remote from where't people are using them. but secondly, you know, the availability of electricity is also important. large amounts of electricity is also important. and, you know, you do mention water. and what's quite interesting about water and not many people realise this, is that the more water that we use for cooling, the more efficient we are in our use of electricity. so there's kind of a trade—off between the use of electricity and the use of water. so we look at that for every build of data centre that we are about to undertake. and if water is a scarce resource, then we look to implement dry cooling. so we don't actually waste water

in the cooling in that particular data centre. but if water is in plentiful supply and we get our water from all sorts of sources, so for example, actually just here in dublin, i heard that we've got kind of a ground water collection where we've effectively buried what they describe to me as a big sponge into the ground underneath our data centre, and what that does is absorb water, and so we get our water from there rather than taking it from the mains utility. so we're trying to balance multiple scarce resources and, well, take care of carbon emissions and so on at the same time. and gary, the data industry, it's notjust about the hardware, but it's also hugely equally important resource. but it's also a hugely strategically important resource. i mean, countries and regions looking to control and own their own systems with things like gdpr laws here in europe.

i'mjust wondering, gary, how much is geopolitics shaping the industry? yeah, well, i think that's a really interesting question and it's the reason that we are located around the world, you know, in every one of the six continents and in all of the kind of key countries of economic activity around the world, because really, you know, the digital infrastructure that we support underpins not only businesses and leisure, but actually societies, it keeps societies running all around the world. so, you know, it's tremendously important. and given that level of importance, then the sort of environmental and social governance then becomes even more important, you know, and governments are quite interested in what we're doing for good reason and we are very proactive trying to be a good citizen wherever we're located. and let me end on this, gary. where do you see the industry going forward? i'm wondering, is there a silver bullet around the corner for the data world? i think there is no one silver bullet. but, you know, one of the innovations that is very exciting and interesting

is something called liquid cooling where actually we send, you know, liquid water cooling straight onto the board and into the chipsets that sit within the it. and that means that we're not cooling by blowing air over racks of it, but we're actually removing the heat through water that gets circulated around the, you know, the chips themselves. that has dramatic increasing energy efficiency by applying that technology. well, on that point, gary aitkenhead from equinix, a real pleasure having you on the show. good luck with everything and i'll check in with you soon. my pleasure. thanks. good talking with you. so we've been speaking about the environmental impact of our ever—expanding online lives with the energy needed to power our digital world. now, you may not know this, but e.0n, it's one of europe's biggest energy companies, it's heavily involved in supplying green energy to the tech world and at the forefront of new innovations, it's capturing waste heat from sizzling servers to warm oui’ homes.

so i caught up with the big boss. leonard birenbaum, a real pleasure having you on my show, and thanks for your time. i know you like to go by leo, so that's what i'll use. and leo, on the show this week, we've been looking at the mighty rise of data centres around the world as our lives are just going more and more online. and of course, these are very power hungry facilities and with growing populations and globalisation, it feels like this isn't a problem that's going to go away. how do we make this work? first, aaron, pleasure to be on your show. second, no, the mighty data and energy hunger is going to remain. so data centres globally consume something right now, we estimate between a0 and 80% of the total electricity consumption of germany. and if we look at the growth rates, we assume that in 2030 this might rise actually to something like half of the electricity consumption

of the us, something like 2,000 terawatt hours. and it's not only the population and the population growth and globalisation which is driving it, it's also new technology like chatgtp, it uses three times the energy consumption of a google search. now how do we do? what do we do about it? number one, we need to make all datacentres always more energy efficient. and the data centre operators are doing that. and number two, we need to make sure that we use the waste energy out of such data centres, for example, for heating in the neighbourhood. and this is what we as e.0n are doing on a large scale. for example, as we just inaugurated a data centre in stockholm where we are doing that and it serves one third of the total energy consumption. so this is the type of innovation we need for this challenge. so you basically sell the excess energy, the excess heat. so my question is this, leo, can watching cat videos help heat a city?

to a certain extent, yes. but obviously, in the end, you know, it's still energy consumption because it reduces really the total energy demand. yes, it can help to heat a city, but it still means you need to produce energy first somewhere. leo, the war on ukraine has resulted in an unprecedented increase in, you know, energy prices, something many of our viewers are really struggling with. just tell us what that's meant for, for e.0n and how did you adapt as a company to the massive supply and demand changes? yeah, first, it's horrific. what has it meant to us? first, we have been personally affected. e.0n is also supplying the border areas of slovakia, hungary, romania to ukraine and so we had direct interactions there and also the synchronisation of the grid in ukraine with the european, western european grid partially happened also in our supply areas. so we were on the ground affected by it.

the second effect is that we had to basically change all the processes that we had established because the absolute unprecedented volatility and also the huge price level meant that obviously also we were challenged. we had, you know, we had to provide billions of additional working capital to just continue to procure the energy which was rising by a factor of 10 to 20 on the electricity and gas side. here in the uk, e.0n increased prices back in april of last year by around 54% for customers on your standard variable tariff, i mean, what do you say, leo, to your customers during this cost of living crisis? we are trying to actually help them to cope with these cost increases. and we have, by the way, the same challenge that we have in the uk, in all other markets, in eastern european markets, in germany, in netherlands, sweden, wherever we are active. the challenge is we cannot sell

the energy below the price at which we are acquiring it. and just to clarify it, in the last year, we have made zero, really zero profits in b2c retail in the uk and that despite the fact that the working capital requirements have increased dramatically. leo, do you think governments are doing enough? should they be doing more and intervening to assist those that i guess are the hardest hit? we had the same discussions all across europe. i guess the first... ..absolute must is given that we have seen the prices exploding from something like 30 euros per megawatt hour on the power side, to 300, 400, 500. although by a factor, an order of magnitude that was just too much and too fast. and so it was necessary to dampen a bit this increase and to take the volatility away where it wasn't taken away by the suppliers already.

and i think that governments have usually done by introducing price caps or schemes. so that was, i think, important. the volatility was too high. protect the customers from this volatility. this was number one. number two is customers cannot be protected... i mean, we should not take the price signal away completely away, because we still need to incentivise customers to save energy. so also what i am always saying to everybody, everybody needs to save energy. even if you can afford it, it's good for the total system and for maybe for your neighbour who can't afford it. because if everybody saves energy, then, you know, the price increase also goes down. leo, i'm wondering what's the european energy crisis meant for the industry's competitiveness? clearly, we have lost competitiveness. so the european industry in total now has a higher energy level than it has seen in the past. and this will not go away.

it will not go away because we are moving from a system in which we had lots of pipeline import towards a system which is much more lng dependent and lng isjust more expensive than pipelines. so that means that we are now moving from a lower level to a higher level when it comes to the energy prices. and that is a disadvantage versus to us, which is remaining basically on a significantly lower level. and we are now catching up with asia, which traditionally has been on a higher energy level. so we have lost versus the us, we have lost versus asia. we cannot hope that this will go away so we need to compensate for that in other areas. well, let me ask you this, leo, as the big boss of certainly one of europe's biggest power providers. did europe put all its eggs in one basket, in terms of relying on russian energy? no, we did not. we had other suppliers like the lng in the uk. we had lots of lng

in southern europe. we have algerian lng, but we did not have enough diversification. so i think what we can take away from that is also in other areas we should not look for becoming completely autonomous. this is probably not possible for an economic body like europe, but we should make sure that we are not in a strategic dependence and that we cannot be blackmailed. and i think we had too high a share, obviously, of russian imports, and that made us strategically vulnerable. and it took us one year and it will probably also take us still the remainder of this year, the remainder of this year to get out of that. and the war on ukraine, leo, has really pushed companies like yourself towards sustainable energy. but of course, change doesn't happen overnight. infrastructure is expensive. policy changes take time to to push through. i'm just wondering, leo,

if you could wave your magic wand and completely transform the global energy network, what would it look like? i would just make sure that the infrastructure is strong enough to cope with the addition of renewables, e—mobility, electric heat pumps, etc. because this is what i think the most dangerous bottleneck is ahead of us if we think about the energy transition. it's not whether we can deploy more renewables or whether we can deploy evs fast across europe. it's whether we have the infrastructure to cope with that. i think we are at a point in which the real bottleneck is infrastructure. so if i would have a magic wish, i would wish that this problem goes away. well, on that point, leonard birenbaum, the big boss of e.0n, a real pleasure having you on my show, my friend. thanks for your time. good luck with everything. and i'll talk to you soon. thank you. and we can need all the luck we can get. thanks a lot. well, that's it for this week's show. i hope you enjoyed it. don't forget, you can keep up

with the latest on our global economy on the bbc website or the smartphone app. of course, you can also follow me on twitter. tweet me. i'll tweet you back. you can get me @bbcaaron. thanks for watching. i'll see you soon, bye—bye. hello, there. it's been a rather grey and gloomy saturday for many. a few scattered showers around as well. take a look at this weather watcher picture from thurnby in leicester, fairly indicative of the day. now, if you take a look at the satellite picture, you can see how extensive the cloud has been. there were some breaks across north—east england and parts of scotland, but also some showers. and drawing your attention to this speckled cloud in the far north—east, potential for some snow showers waiting in the wings to arrive later on monday. so, through the next few hours, we keep that blanket of cloud for many, some coastal showers out to the west and east, perhaps more persistent ones in the far north—east of scotland. but because of the cloud around, on the whole, temperatures should just stay up into low single

figures, but it's going to be a chilly start to our sunday morning. once again, another grey and gloomy day, almost a repeat performance of saturday's story. there will be some coastal showers around, on the whole, largely quiet and temperatures sitting between 6—9 celsius, just that little bit colder in the northern isles as that cold air starts to descend. so, arctic air pushing its way steadily southwards as we go into monday. so, really from monday onwards, you're going to start to notice the difference to the feel of our weather. if you haven't already heard, it's going to turn cold and windy, and snow and ice could be an issue, particularly to the far north and east. so, it's likely as we go through the day on monday, this weather front will introduce the colder air. it's going to turn the rain ahead of the front into snow showers behind it, particularly across the far north and east of scotland and north—east england. to the south of that weather front we'll still keep those temperatures around generally 7—9 celsius.

but then that sinks its way steadily south, so we start off on tuesday with some sunny spells, cold and frosty. and, yes, there will be further snow showers across northern and eastern coasts, and those temperatures are going to struggle, 4—5 celsius, but factor in the strength and the direction of the wind, it certainly will feel noticeably colder. so, certainly you'll need to wrap up warm. it looks likely that we are going to see that cold snap continuing through the middle part of the week as well. so, if you've got outdoor travel plans monday into tuesday, do be aware that there's a potential for snow and ice in the north—east.

this is bbc world news. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories... fighting in the streets of bakhmut — as russian forces continue their attempt to capture the ukrainian city. more schoolgirls in iran have been targeted, in apparent poison gas attacks. the united nations and iran reach an agreement that would allow further inspections of tehran�*s nuclear programme. prince harry describes writing his memoir as an act of service — he says he hopes sharing details of his life will help others. once the book came out i felt incredibly free, i felt a huge weight off my shoulders. and still no deal — un countries try to reach an angreement on a long—awaited environmental treaty to protect the high seas.